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Old 4th Dec 2015, 08:19
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600ft-lb
 
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The reset culture isn't really a culture, the Airbus troubleshooting manual actually directs the engineer to perform a single reset per flight leg. If the fault reoccurs in the same leg more action is required. With that in mind and the tendency for Airbuses self report faults that dont exist, for example through power transfers, it may seem like the engineers are just making the message go away.. It's not quite true.

The thing about Airbuses though is it will travel many sectors after a reset before another reoccurrence happens of a previously reset fault but as latent fault in the computer itself will manifest itself as more frequently occurring faults as exactly was the case in this crash. A competent MOC will monitor a trending fault with tools provided by Airbus themselves and competent engineers won't keep penning off a fault which occurs each flight or with a regular occurrence, that's what the DDG is for.

The airline won't want to wear an unnecessary delay and they definitely don't want engineers replacing computers that would go to a repair shop and subsequently returned as no fault found. Trend reporting is important but only if it's acted upon, which in this case it's plainly obvious it wasn't.
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